Conservation of Water on the Farm
How can farmers use an underground tile system to make the most of the water that they have available to them?
When water flows underground, it can be hard to predict where it will go. Farmers use tile systems to guide water as it flows underground.
Transcript
[Abby Brown] This is my friend Alyssa and she knows lots and lots about conserving water and soil. And we call her job a conservationist. You know so much because --
[Alyssa Yoder] I'm a fourth generation conservation contractor.
[Abby] Okay. So, your parents were conservationists.
[Alyssa] They were.
[Abby] Your grandparents were conservationists.
[Alyssa] They were.
[Abby] And your great-grandparents were conservationists.
[Abby] Now, I assume what you do is a whole lot different than what your great-grandparents did, correct?
[Alyssa] A little bit, yeah.
[Abby] So, tell me how things have changed over time.
[Alyssa] Well, when my great-grandpa started to install tile back in the 1940s, he installed tile that looked like this.
[Abby] What is, what does a tile do?
[Alyssa] This is a clay tile and we put it in the ground in a trench that a machine digs and then water seeps in through these little cracks and runs down the tile to our various filtering systems.
[Abby] So this is a pretty important piece of conservation. And this is intended to get water to go where you want it to go so that it doesn't create new crevices, so that we can use it and so that we can clean it. So, your great-grandparents were using clay and today conservationists use these plastic tiles, but they do a similar job, right?
[Alyssa] They do the same job.
[Abby] But it's a whole lot different how they get installed.
[Alyssa] It is, it's so different.
[Abby] Okay, so tell me about that.
[Alyssa] Well, the clay tile was installed by hand. When my dad was 17, his grandpa would take his machine that digs a trench up the line and dad would be standing beside the trench and he would grab one of these clay tiles and put it in the hole. All of that by hand.
[Abby] This is not light, you guys. It's heavy.
[Alyssa] This stuff is a lot lighter. And now we string this out along the field next to the tiling machine and it picks it up, runs it through the boot and puts it in the ground for us. We don't have to do it by hand.
[Abby] So even though the tiles are a whole lot different, and the way we put them in the ground is a whole lot different, a lot of the practices that are on the farm today are the same as what your great-grandparents did. So why is that?
[Alyssa] Because the goals of conservation don't change.
[Abby] That makes perfect sense. You can't get new water, you can't get more soil, so we have to take care of it, right?
[Alyssa] Yeah, we've got to take care of what we have and preserve it for future generations.
[Abby] Just like your great-grandparents did for you.
[Alyssa] Exactly!
[Abby] There's lots that you and I can do to conserve our environment. Conservation always has and always will be an important part of agriculture.
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